De-cloaking the second transport, I get in and fire it up. In the rearview monitors, I see the sentries have shaken off the immobilizers and are getting ready to open fire at the transport.
I gun the engine, clearing out of the alley as fast as I can. I really hope none of the blaster fire hits me.
“Team, Bellona is compromised. Rendezvous at extraction point omega. I repeat. Extraction point omega!” I yell over the comms. “We’re taking the fight to them and it’s going to be—“
Suddenly, three sentry bots land in front of the transport and fire some sort of projectile at me.
The last thing I remember before losing consciousness is the transport flipping over and me suspended in mid-air thinking, This is going to hurt.
It did.
◆◆◆
Public Service Announcement
Broadcast Point: Faldan Space Station
A few hours ago, there was a disturbance in the industrial quadrant was reported. This was due to an unfortunate incident involving a container craft that was carrying several defective Jandrium cells. This commotion resulted in the destruction of a platoon of sentry bots, but please be assured that there were no life forms casualties.
Your safety is always our primary concern. Should you have any queries, kindly direct them through the usual channels and we will address them as needed.
Thank you for your compliance.
Chapter Four
Story time.
There is a very unique thing I can do that makes me pretty much the best Alliance Field Operative ever. And it’s not that I can mentally interface with seven elite class robots and act in concert with them as though we were a single entity.
You see, the nanites in my brain can do this thing where it allows me to remove and restore any memories of my choosing (with some pain, but not too much difficulty).
My memory repository of choice? The data cores of any one of my crew members.
Of course, I’m not a machine and my brain is not as pliant as a data storage bank. We aren’t talking about ones and zeroes you can flip on and off. We’re still working with neurons, electrical signals and biochemicals here. We can’t delete or install data wholesale without frying my brain.
I can’t just “write over” my memories and make fake ones. The nanites will pick that up and the cognitive dissonance will result in an aneurysm. I can’t remove more than about an hour or two of memories without the risk of getting permanently locked in a completely vegetative state.
However, small things like, I don’t know, names, faces of fellow agents I only met for a few seconds… heck, even things like secret distress signals and locations of covert Triune Alliance bases… well, those are up for grabs.
Even if you did have tech sophisticated enough not to scramble my brain while poking around, you won’t find anything that simply… isn’t there. So, slag my neurons all you want. If it’s not in my head, it’s not there to be found. And that basically means I can be interrogation-proof. Am I an asset in the field or what?
Hold that thought, because here’s where it gets interesting.
You see, Octavia, due to her massive paranoia, built the seven members of my crew in such a way that any attempt to access their data cores by force would cause a system meltdown, effectively lobotomizing them. She apparently felt the need for complete control over the data she gathered through their systems, thus prompting her inner mad scientist to ensure that only the person in possession of the unique nanites implanted into me can access said data cores.
In her brain, that person was going to be her.
Did I mention that Evil Queen Octavia’s initial plan for me was to be her disposable guinea pig? I was to be the key stepping stone on her path to becoming the galaxy’s most feared and powerful weapon.
She intended to use my brain to precondition her experimental nanites, in order to enslave the wills of these seven highly advanced and specialized synthetic minds to mine. On the tail end of that successful milestone, she planned to liquefy my brain and harvest the nanites so she could bond them to herself.
As a concurrent failsafe, she enabled access to any of the seven data cores only when absolutely all the following conditions were met:
Requestor has fully bonded with the experimental nanites
Access is requested via the neuroweave
Requestor is doing so under their own volition with no perceivable coercion or chemical influence as verified by all seven bots
Cute failsafe.
But Octavia didn’t account for my compatibility with the nanites. To twist the knife even further, she did not expect my brain to outperform hers. So when she found out I had actually bonded with all seven of her experimental bots, she just about lost it.
To course correct, she was going to scrub the bots clean and erase our “bonds”, while simultaneously starting experiments on herself to bring her brain up to speed with mine. All of which would start by creating a “duplicate” access key via identical nanites she would have bonded to herself.
But we escaped before she could do it. The rest is history.
Right now though, that wasn’t the part of my history flooding through me. None of those good parts where I flee my captors and find a new life for myself. No, it's just the bad parts flooding through my mind as I start to regain consciousness.
I wake to a ringing in my ears and a pounding in my head. I have been injured many times over the years and have learned to identify when there are chemicals in my system, like there are now.
As I slowly get my bearings, I notice it. More than just the expected flesh and bone sensations, parts of my mind feel bruised.
She’s done a read of me! I can always tell when my memories have been accessed, and Octavia has invaded my mind just like this hundreds of times before.
My vision finally clears and I see her. Octavia the Fifth, the High Queen Bitch of the known galaxy. Well-coifed and smug, the smell of her perfume triggering too many memories at once.
For a moment, I am little again. Cold, alone, scared. Living in fear of displeasing my “stepmama”.
It feels like I have gone back to being the child held captive against her will, only just learning how to ask my new friends to “hold” some of my memories so “Mama Octavia” doesn’t find out we secretly played together. I lived in perpetual dread of her data extraction sessions, always deathly afraid she might find a stray memory that I was unable to hide.
Even after all this time, I am powerless before her.
Some part of my mind is screaming. I know I am not that same little girl. In fact, I am far from powerless. But I am hard-pressed to listen to that voice when fear grips my heart.
I force myself to look at her. It takes all of my strength to keep calm, to face her and stay defiant.
If not for the lines on her face and the very clear sensation of vertical restraint (as opposed to horizontal, as was the case in my childhood), I could have sworn this was Leghrelnis and a world of pain awaited me.
But I am lucid enough now to know this isn’t Leghrelnis. I am, however, far from hopeful that a world of pain is not in my immediate future.
“She wakes at last.” Octavia says in the same eerily soothing tone as always.
“Oh, hey.” I manage to say, taking in the room. Wait, it’s not a room. We’re in the damned military compound, or at least it looks like a room in the compound. In a haze, I access my own memories of the compound from Jean Philippe’s hack of the space station's layout.
This was a training yard, with reinforced walls and very high ceilings. It was a place where complex drills involving all kinds of tech can be conducted and contained.
Several armed guards stand at attention, including Admiral Tarr’haz. None of them wear traditional garb; they're in something spiffier. This must be the Queen’s personal troop. My suspicions are confirmed when I spy the Queen's personal insignia on their uniform. Must be nice to have a private army, I think grimly.
I instinc
tively turn my eyes to the control room overlooking the yard. I can't zoom in and confirm for myself, but I would bet my toes the Queen’s data hounds are up there.
The hounds are her personal cadre of wannabe mad scientists, parsing data and fighting for even the tiniest scraps of opportunity to ingratiate themselves with Her Royal Highness. The screams of little girls bothered them very little, and that’s all anyone needs to know about them really.
Immediately, the chill of anger frosts the base of my stomach.
“If I were a sentimental woman, I would feel a flush of nostalgia at having all my children in one room like this. And after such a long time too.” She says, which draws my attention to the row of containment pods behind her.
Then, I see them. All seven of them, still skinned up. They look so vulnerable. So human. Silently, I thank the higher powers that the Queen thinks them useful to her. After all, they are a treasure trove of data she could use for her mad scientist dreams to rule the galaxy. Not that she could get at them right now. At least, not without me anyway.
I could question why she doesn’t consider us a powerful threat and eliminate us on the spot. But I don’t. I am thankful that she is crazy enough to keep all eight of us alive.
I take a second to assess myself for any additional damage. The fact that I am coherent and have (arguably) full possession of my motor functions means she didn’t try a brute force hack into my memories. That would have literally melted my brain. Still, I’m sure she skimmed a lot of the surface and eroded some of the mental guards I shored up.
Even with some of my memories blanked out, that’s still never good for the Alliance. It’s worse for me and the bots because she’s now privy to everything we planned and have done so far.
It’s even worse for Captain Zavus.
“Take it you’ve had a nice little tour of my head? You know, like old times?” I banter.
“So smug, thinking your Alliance friends have the upper hand because you can remove things from your memory.” The Queen says with a sneer. She's not wrong about that; it was, after all, the one advantage we had against her.
“Though I must admit, I am glad to know that my failsafe remains flawless. Even if it is still rather inconvenient for me. So know this. When I break you, and I will, I’ll have the keys to access the memory cores of your crew.” Octavia continues. “And with it, the secret to how you’ve all managed to… what is your dreary little pet name for it? ‘Achieve full interface’?”
I return her condescending smile with a scowl.
You wouldn’t think it to look at her but she’s completely insane. She looks more like a mother who has learned to put up with your “rebellious phase” than an inter-galactic despot lunatic. She even comes off as pleasant at first.
This side of her has fooled too many people into believing her lies about building a better galaxy.
Of course, not too many people have seen her when she’s cross. Usually, it’s the last thing they see, as it means you’ve gotten on her bad side.
“Children need a firm hand. I’ve always believed this. But you, my dear, have been a thorn in my side for far too long. I never really consider anything I do a failure. Not when they can be turned into opportunities.” She smiles. A beat later, I hear the hiss as the large training yard doors begin to open. “Very soon, I shall be rid of you, and then I will deal with the traitors in my midst. The Alliance is wise to silo the information about their spy network, but I have a special fate planned for Captain Zavus. Now that I know he’s here, it will be much much simpler. How do you feel by the way? About effectively drawing him out and thus dooming him to the fate he deserves?”
My heart twists. I know she'll make good on her threat, as she suffers no fools or traitors.
Before I can worry any more about Z, I hear heavy footfalls and the mechanized whir of elite tech. Soon enough, four synthoids stand at ease in front of us, presenting themselves to the Queen. It takes me a second look to recognize that they aren’t just synthoids. Adaptive skins, the faint smell of Jandrium, the glint of what can only be Physicorum Alloy instead of skin.
This was bad news, the likes of which the Galaxy had never seen before. And I had an immediate feeling I’d be the first to find out why.
“Meet my Huntsmen.” Octavia says. “The next true step in my quest to craft the perfect weapon.”
The elite tech is easy to recognize. We stole enough of it when we escaped Leghrelnis. And with the crew working nonstop, we even managed to reverse engineer the crap out of it so we could design all our gear and build the Winter Diamond.
Whatever these things are, they’ll be good. Even on a purely technological level, they’ll be better than anything the crew and I have cobbled together. Doctor Capaldi is a bloody genius, but, even with Bellona's help, he isn’t mad scientist level genius.
“I was going through a very creative phase when I made you all. You were all parts of a… pet project that I had hoped would result in the greatest weapon the galaxy has ever seen. And what do you do instead? Squander all that opportunity and potential.” She rants. “Today, we shall test if my Huntsmen, void of all your flaws, will prove worthy successors and thus, can course correct some rather off-kilter variables of my life’s work.”
“Wait. So you got all of us in one room to test your new toys out? To see if they hold a candle to the original?” I ask.
“Don’t be simple, my dear. I created you to be better than that. So, do use that beautifully crafted brain for a moment please.” She scolds lightly, like I was a child who had forgotten my table manners. “I predict my Huntsmen will make short work of you and your friends. I will then harvest your memories and your brain specifically. Finally, I will retrieve all the tech I installed. My adaptive nanites have been evolving in the last decade and have no doubt gathered an unprecedented amount of data. I am absolutely exhilarated at the chance to download what they’ve collected in full.”
The guards set me free, just as the containment pods open with a hiss. Soon, all of us are standing in front of the Queen.
I’m not used to seeing the bots skinned up like this. Not lately, anyway, since we’ve had very few infiltration ops that required all of us to assume human form. Doctor Capaldi, Bellona and Jean Philippe did an excellent job. I could basically read their facial expressions just as well as I could read them in the neuroweave.
Before I can speak, the guards place our weapons caches in front of us.
“You’re arming us?” I ask incredulously.
“Well. Yes. This experiment needs to be conducted within reasonable bounds. I have every interest in harvesting what I can from your collective remains.” The Queen says. “This next experiment eliminates the perpetual thorn at my side and shall prove that my newest creations are superior. All in one elegant stroke. Now suit up, children. One must face the inevitable with both dignity and class.”
I laugh in easily the most undignified way possible. She scowls, and it’s all I can do to keep from giggling my head clean off. “Your Majesty, there are so few moments in my unnatural life that I am thankful you’re a raging psychopath. This is one of them.”
Silence stretches between us for a few seconds. “Make sure her brain is undamaged.” She finally says. “Hounds, begin data collection.”
She heads out of the room, most likely to the observation deck. She’s going to want to watch her experiment succeed.
“Yuki, are you alright?” Leon asks. He looks worried, and I instinctively reach out to touch his cheek.
“I’m fine. Thank you, Leon.” I say reassuringly.
Cold Snap Page 5